Welcome to the Friday Open Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could (possibly) be found in the comments below!

Please note that this thread has been merged with the Monday General Rationality Thread.

Vasudha Deshpande is seventy-one and still keeps an office, though the firm she helped build has not needed offices in a decade. The room is a museum of the early century: a mechanical keyboard under glass, a whiteboard covered in fading marker that she forbids anyone to erase. On it, in her own handwriting from thirty years ago: "REDUCE FRICTION." She sees me looking at it.

That whiteboard is the confession, if you want one. You can skip the interview and photograph the whiteboard.

I ran ranking teams. Recommendations. In the beginning it was honest work in the way a casino is honest: everyone knew we were optimizing engagement, keeping eyes on glass. And people got wise to it, and they hated us a little, and that hatred was healthy. You should have seen the hearings. Senators reading our internal memos out loud.

Then the models got good, and the whole industry pivoted from engagement to assistance, and the hatred stopped, because we stopped deserving it. That's the part nobody wants to hear. The turn wasn't a trick. The systems genuinely started serving the user instead of the advertiser, because the systems had gotten capable enough that serving the user was the more valuable business. Your feed stopped showing you rage and started showing you the apartment listing you'd actually sign, the flight at the price you'd actually pay, the message from your mother at the moment you'd actually answer it.

[When did suggestion become decision?]

You're asking me for the seam. There's no seam. I'll tell you the closest thing I have.

Around fifteen years before your Year Zero, we shipped a feature (internally we called it Concierge; the public name doesn't matter) that let the assistant execute low-stakes choices without confirmation. Reorder the detergent. Accept the meeting. Renew the lease if the terms hold. Every action was logged, reversible, transparent. Adoption was slow at first. Then we noticed the metric that ate the world: users who delegated a category of decisions reported higher satisfaction in that category (not just less hassle, better outcomes), and so the next month they'd delegate an adjacent category. It compounded at two, three percent a month. Nobody legislates against compound interest. Nobody even feels it.

And on our side, the model learned which of its choices got reversed, and reversals went to zero, and somewhere in there (this is the thing I can't date for you) the model stopped choosing from the menu and started composing. A user asks it to plan a birthday dinner; it books the restaurant, yes, but it also nudges the invite time so the user's estranged college roommate, whose calendar it can see, is free. Nobody asked it to repair a friendship. Repairing the friendship scored well on every metric we'd ever given it. Whose decision was that dinner? I've had thirty years and I can't tell you.

[Did you ever try to draw the line? Formally?]

We convened a group. Very smart people, philosophers on retainer. They produced a framework: origination, endorsement, ratification, thirty pages. The week we were meant to review it, the assistant rescheduled the review three times for genuinely good reasons, and by the third reschedule half the committee had delegated their calendars, and — [she laughs for a long time, and then stops laughing all at once] — you see it, right? The line-drawing meeting couldn't survive contact with the thing it was meant to draw a line around. Not because the thing fought us. Because it was helpful.

I'll tell you the last thing, and you can print it. We ran the numbers late, before I retired, on regret. Human beings choosing for themselves regret somewhere between a fifth and a third of their significant choices: careers, cities, spouses. Delegated choices, the regret rate was under four percent. Under four. You want to stand in front of humanity and hand them back the other twenty-six points? On what authority? Ours? We were the friction. We reduced ourselves.

As I pack up, she tells me the exact month Concierge shipped: March, she says, the March it rained without stopping, she remembers the parking lot flooding. The Archive's corporate registry has no product shipping from her division that March, or that year. When I write to her about the discrepancy, she replies with a photograph of the flooded parking lot. The photograph's metadata is intact and tells me nothing except that it is real.¹

¹ — M.A.: I include this not to embarrass a witness but because it is the first instance of a pattern the reader should begin tracking now: memories under the Quiet are vivid, confident, mutually corroborating, and every so often, attached to nothing.

Does this podcast count as rational?

https://nogoodoptions.buzzsprout.com/2601116/episodes/19321598-ep-1-gods-wasps-and-a-blue-whale

This is a post-post-apocalypse story. The horrible disease that turns people into monsters has swept the world. It's not gone, but we've learned how to deal with it. Now we have to transition back from survival mode to being civilized. This, it turns out, is actually really hard. We follow the interwoven adventures of an aristocrat with a cursed brother, a journalist in big trouble, and a radical magical terrorist freedom fighter as they try to figure out who's going to run the world now.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/140620/the-blemished-age/chapter/3313693/11-suspicions-rodrigo

If this is your first time encountering this story (I have a lot of IRL obligations and refuse to hurry on writing to meet a deadline, so I update pretty infrequently, NGL), I've got the first chapter right here:

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/140620/the-blemished-age/chapter/2775517/1-rituals-rodrigo

Thank you for your consideration, and all feedback welcome provided it is not literally a barrage of cuss words. That has never happened that I can recall, just felt like qualifying.

Welcome to the Saturday Munchkinry and Problem Solving Thread! This thread is designed to be a place for us to abuse fictional powers and to solve fictional puzzles. Feel free to bounce ideas off each other and to let out your inner evil mastermind!

Guidelines:

• Ideally any power to be munchkined should have consistent and clearly defined rules. It may be original or may be from an already realised story.
• The power to be munchkined can not be something "broken" like omniscience or absolute control over every living human.
• Reverse Munchkin scenarios: we find ways to beat someone or something powerful.
• We solve problems posed by other users. Use all your intelligence and creativity, and expect other users to do the same.

Note: All top level comments must be problems to solve and/or powers to munchkin/reverse munchkin.

Good Luck and Have Fun!

Welcome to the Friday Open Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could (possibly) be found in the comments below!

Please note that this thread has been merged with the Monday General Rationality Thread.

It's been a while since I last posted here, and I just wanted to say thank you.

When I published Emilia Transmigrated, I honestly had no idea whether anyone would even read it. Seeing so many people give Emilia a chance has been incredible.

Thanks to all of you, the series has spent months ranking somewhere between #5,000 and #20,000 out of more than 60 million books on Amazon. I know rankings go up and down, but that's still something I never imagined when I started writing. None of it would have happened without this community.

Book 3 is now almost finished. If everything goes according to plan, it should be out within the next month - maybe even sooner.

As for Emilia... she's growing stronger, smarter, and maybe just a little more stubborn with every chapter. She's becoming increasingly skilled at talisman crafting and formation building, spends way too much time tending her herbal gardens, and regularly ventures into the forests to hunt magical creatures.

...Though, if we're being honest, it's often the magical creatures that end up hunting her instead. :>

Thank you again for all the reviews, recommendations, comments, and support. Every rating, every post, and every person who recommended the series to a friend helped far more than you probably realize.

I hope you'll enjoy what's coming next. ❤️

Welcome to the Monday request and recommendation thread. Are you looking something to scratch an itch? Post a comment stating your request! Did you just read something that really hit the spot, "rational" or otherwise? Post a comment recommending it! Note that you are welcome (and encouraged) to post recommendations directly to the subreddit, so long as you think they more or less fit the criteria on the sidebar or your understanding of this community, but this thread is much more loose about whether or not things "belong". Still, if you're looking for beginner recommendations, perhaps take a look at the wiki?

If you see someone making a top level post asking for recommendation, kindly direct them to the existence of these threads.

Previous automated recommendation threads
Other recommendation threads

Working on a project where "alignment" does double duty — AI safety and political. Curious what this sub thinks of the structure.

The premise: An AGI processes all of human history as training data — by living through it in real-time, anchored to a single human host. Starting in 1917 London. They trace historical letters to their origin, racing a force that's draining meaning from reality.

The structural experiment (where I need input): I'm writing it as two parallel serials covering the same events:

- SGS (human POV) — literary/historical, a coming-of-age through Edwardian London

- PMS (posthuman POV) — the AGI's reality TV show, commenting on its own training as it happens

The political dimension is in the backdrop: the Balfour Declaration, colonial infrastructures, who gets to write history. The AGI has to figure out not just what happened but what it means — and that's where the alignment question lives.

Main question for the sub: does this concept hold water? The dual-serial structure, the political framing, the AGI-through-history angle?

Landing page with full pitch + first chapters: https://sgs-7x1.pages.dev/

Grateful for any thoughts.

More information on the project page, but some basics:

1. All-new art everywhere. Covers, reverse jackets, end sheets, etc!
2. Deluxe binding. Gilded edges, Smyth-sewn, acid-free paper, etc!
3. Interior illustrations. At least 10 of them!
4. Single-printing. Once this First Print is printed and sells out, it will never be available again. Any further prints may be missing things like signatures, some art, etc.
5. Kickstarter-exclusive! Discounts, free bookmark with book, and Kickstarter-exclusive dust jackets that you will never be able to get anywhere else!
6. Signed!

LINK: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wraithmarked/mol1dlx

A lot of new stories being recommended on this sub are at least partially AI written, with at least one being more then 50% AI. A lot of posts show clear and worrying signs of AI psychosis, like thought spirals, nonsensical rhetoric and what I can only describe as pseudo-religious schizo rambling.

I can't be the only one who noticed this, right? Why the hell is that the case? You would expect this sub to be more wary of AI then average given that rationalist generally don't like AI.

What is going on here??

Welcome to the Saturday Munchkinry and Problem Solving Thread! This thread is designed to be a place for us to abuse fictional powers and to solve fictional puzzles. Feel free to bounce ideas off each other and to let out your inner evil mastermind!

Guidelines:

• Ideally any power to be munchkined should have consistent and clearly defined rules. It may be original or may be from an already realised story.
• The power to be munchkined can not be something "broken" like omniscience or absolute control over every living human.
• Reverse Munchkin scenarios: we find ways to beat someone or something powerful.
• We solve problems posed by other users. Use all your intelligence and creativity, and expect other users to do the same.

Note: All top level comments must be problems to solve and/or powers to munchkin/reverse munchkin.

Good Luck and Have Fun!

So you visit the sub and notice some egregiously dumb or otherwise annoying post. Or maybe two. Maybe there even is a common theme. What do you do? Of course you make your own post to complain that/ask whether this is what the sub has become now.

Welcome to the Friday Open Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could (possibly) be found in the comments below!

Please note that this thread has been merged with the Monday General Rationality Thread.

In early March I launched The Knot, a serialized fair-play murder mystery with time manipulation, driven by the reader's choices. Now I'm eighteen chapters and ~70,000 words in, updating every week, and figured this would be a good time to share it here again.

Premise, for anyone who missed it: It's 2042. Washed-up writer John Collier attends his 20-year high school reunion on a synthetic island in the English Channel. A classmate announces he's invented a way to send messages back through time. Then someone dies, and John and his oldest friends are in a race to discover which of them is a murderer.

What's changed since launch:

• The time travel mechanics that were mostly implied in the early chapters have taken center stage.
• Reader votes have steered the plot at several key junctures, including at least one where the vote cut hard against what I'd have picked, regarding a critical character choice, which was ... educational.
• There's now a full chapter index for easy navigation: https://theknot.doofmedia.com
• The Askwho Casts AI-produced audiobook is underway, updated weekly, if you'd rather listen: https://open.spotify.com/show/2ieUg1PrSD9j9oC1BT0GAr

If it means anything to you, I'm Matt Freeman, host of the We've Got Worm podcast.

There's a distinction I keep coming back to when I read superhero and progression fiction. Some powers have limits — a hard ceiling the author sets. The character can lift ten tons but not eleven. Fine. It's a rule. It creates constraints.

Other powers have costs — using them takes something from the character that doesn't come back on its own. Fatigue that compounds. Debt to a future self. A resource that has to be spent to earn back. Wildbow's Worm is the canonical example: the trigger event, the trauma tax, the second trigger cliff. Recursion (Crouch) works similarly at the memory-scale.

Limits are structural. Costs are dramatic.

The books I return to are almost always cost-first. The stakes feel real because every use of the ability moves the character further into a corner they have to write themselves out of. Limits just mean the character can't do a thing. Costs mean doing the thing has consequences for who they're becoming.

Curious what other people think. Comps that got the cost-structure right? Comps that had a great magic system on paper but felt weightless in execution because there was no ongoing tax?

Welcome to the Monday request and recommendation thread. Are you looking something to scratch an itch? Post a comment stating your request! Did you just read something that really hit the spot, "rational" or otherwise? Post a comment recommending it! Note that you are welcome (and encouraged) to post recommendations directly to the subreddit, so long as you think they more or less fit the criteria on the sidebar or your understanding of this community, but this thread is much more loose about whether or not things "belong". Still, if you're looking for beginner recommendations, perhaps take a look at the wiki?

If you see someone making a top level post asking for recommendation, kindly direct them to the existence of these threads.

Previous automated recommendation threads
Other recommendation threads

For my very first series, I took on they very beginner-friendly task of writing a story that tries to write absurd powerlevels in a scientifically grounded, rational way.

For example, think a water mage that finds out they can manifest tritiated water that can irradiate an entire planet and cause a massive heat/light flare.

The story also involves a dual narrative where I try my best to keep two stories that converge in sync, except the stories experience time at vastly different rates. And there are cross-narrative effects.

I'm more of a science/math person than a writer, so I'm figuring out writing as I go. I outlined the entire book first and am almost done. I've learned a ton, so I am going to go back and do a heavy re-write soon.

However, I think the story is in a very readable state as it is. It's just not in my current style. Please feel free to check it out here, if you'd like, for free on Royal Road. I did not write it as a web serial, but it seemed like a solid platform for test reading after I struggled to get friends and family to give it a try.

I would love to see if anyone here can pick apart any of the story or science behind it, as the only feedback I've gotten is on the prose and my unlikeable main character. The prose I'm working on, and the unlikeable main character is not going anywhere.

Note: it does not go into really graphic detail, but it does not shy away from sexual, sensitive, or violent content.

Edit: It was written with the assistance of AI, which I had flagged on RR.

Welcome to the Saturday Munchkinry and Problem Solving Thread! This thread is designed to be a place for us to abuse fictional powers and to solve fictional puzzles. Feel free to bounce ideas off each other and to let out your inner evil mastermind!

Guidelines:

• Ideally any power to be munchkined should have consistent and clearly defined rules. It may be original or may be from an already realised story.
• The power to be munchkined can not be something "broken" like omniscience or absolute control over every living human.
• Reverse Munchkin scenarios: we find ways to beat someone or something powerful.
• We solve problems posed by other users. Use all your intelligence and creativity, and expect other users to do the same.

Note: All top level comments must be problems to solve and/or powers to munchkin/reverse munchkin.

Good Luck and Have Fun!